In the past interfacing Arduino to complex web services has been challenging, especially if you want to do more advanced networking—for instance using WebSockets or Bonjour—as these services often use fairly verbose text formats like XML or JSON that require a lot of RAM to parse. The Arduino Yún comes with a new Bridge library which will allow the Linux-side and the Arduino-side to communicate with each other, and allow you to offload all the RAM-intensive networking onto the Linux machine and allow the Arduino to do what it’s good at—talking to hardware.

The Yún can be programmed just like a traditional Arduino, using a USB cable. However since the board also has Wi-Fi and Ethernet connections on-board, it to communicate with networks out of the box, and the new 1.5.4 release of the Arduino IDE has the ability to auto-detect any Arduino Yún connected to the local network.

Tom Igoe giving a sneak peak at the Arduino Yún at the ITP Summer Camp earlier in the year.

Tom Igoe giving a sneak peak at the Arduino Yún at the ITP Summer Camp earlier in the year.

Tom Igoe giving a sneak peak at the Arduino Yún at the ITP Summer Camp earlier in the year.

Alasdair Allan is a scientist, author, hacker and tinkerer, who at the moment is spending a lot of his time thinking about the Internet of Things. In the past he has mesh networked the Moscone Center, caused a U.S. Senate hearing, and contributed to the detection of what was—at the time—the most distant object yet discovered.